Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (review)

How do we understand the nearly ubiquitous representation of the woman warrior in the hyper-masculine nationalism of modern Germany? Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly brings the likes of Kleist and Schiller into frequent contact with texts obscured from us either by their age (many are early modern) or their authorship—women authors suffering from a lack of public attention in their day and of critical attention in ours. Men, the author reminds us, create most of the imaginings of women warriors: the Amazon queen Penthesilea, Brünhild, Judith of the Apocrypha, Joan of Arc, and a panoply of other lesser-known viragoes, hermaphrodites, and cross-dressers who at one point become “unwomen.” The woman warrior shows woman at her most transgressive and therefore most dangerous; this danger is neutralized by death, rape, or marriage, often secretly desired by the woman struggling with her guilt after having upset the normal gender order. This is heady stuff, worthy of detailed research into a variety of primary sources followed by extensive analysis. Of the former, we have much; of the latter, however, much is lacking.

First, there is the title. I can say with confidence that we are not meant to think of the French fairy tale, a fact that might not be evident to someone browsing a list of titles in a database. Though Watanabe-O’Kelly does, in her introduction, couch the choice of title by aligning the seductive and violent aspects of the woman warrior with the “beastly” in the imaginings of male, presumably sexist authors, it becomes a conceit that does not work and seems to be one that she ultimately does not really believe in, so seldom are her explicit references to the beastly or to the beautiful (neither word appears in the index). Such fleeting superficialities haunt her study, at times leaving the reader with more questions than before the reading, yet bizarrely not irreparably shaking the edifice of the original premise. I suppose that this is in large part owing to the predictability of the book’s trajectory: as women begin to write and cast the woman warrior in a less dismissive or even positive light, the ills caused by the overt sexism of previous patriarchal generations are soothed—the last two chapters focus on women authors writing about the woman warrior from the eighteenth century on, and epithets of praise and even relief abound. This tendency toward anachronism even informs her discussion of subjectivity, which seems to be an indivisible absolute. Hence, she is able to say of Sacher-Masoch’s Judith, who needs no man or divinity to tell her to kill Holofernes, that “[s]he is a real warrior and a real subject, one of the very few Judiths of whom this can be said” (138), as if subjectivity is the effect of one’s correspondence with twenty-first century ideals of independence and not a struggle one has within one’s own milieu.

At certain points in the book I was expecting to find the woman warrior’s search for agency to become a focus of analysis in its own right, its immanent inaccessibility tragically looming over the heroine’s search for agency as painfully and as certainly as the verdict of Joan of Arc’s trial; yet for Watanabe-O’Kelly, the tragedy is that male authors were sexist and wrote sexist treatments of perceived female transgressions. This is part of a larger structural problem, one that blurs the lines between the diegetic shortcomings of, for example, the ethos that drives Brünnhilde to ride into Siegfried’s pyre as opposed to the authorial sexism that led Wagner and his audience to find this an acceptable or even praiseworthy conclusion. Instead of fleshing out her views on these points of tension, the author opts for a boilerplate method of writing...